The Symposium by Plato
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This great work of Plato is a recording of a philosophical discussion and debate of Socrates and his contemporary philosopher friends at a banquet held by Agathon at his residence over the subject called DOCTRINE OF LOVE.

One would get mesmerized by the different opinions about love by some of the greatest Greek minds.The discussion and debate proceeds one after the other with each of the great persons like Agathon, Aristodemus, Eryximachus, Pausanias, Aristophanes and finally Socrates describe love in all possible permutations and combinations. Each of them have their own versions which might appear true to every reader in some context or the other. But the one given by Socrates was of course the best! His version of love is that of immortality through beauty. According to him every living thing loves to be immortal and eternal and hence it re-creates itself through an emotion called love. Hence according to Socrates, love is nothing but one’s affinity for eternity or immortality of body and fame, which is attained through this complex psychological emotion.
At one point in the book, the reader gets an impression about the speakers favoring homosexuality as some of them argue about the purity of love more in the same sex rather than opposite sexes. One gets a feeling that even Socrates favored this in his opinion. But we are not sure of how it got contemplated later.
One can get the best of philosophical definitions and derivations about love in this book right through some of the greatest minds of Greek philosophy.

My favorite quote in the book
“Evil is the vulgar lover who loves the body rather than the soul, in as much as he is not even stable, because he loves a thing which is in itself unstable, and therefore when the bloom of youth which he was desiring is over, he takes wing and flies away, in spite of all his words and promises; whereas the love of the noble disposition is life-long, for it becomes one with the everlasting”

My rating is 3.75 out of 5


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